More mysteries surface.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jeff Lemire
Art: Andrea Sorrentino
Colors: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Steve Wands
What They Say:
The bestselling team of JEFF LEMIRE & ANDREA SORRENTINO (Old Man Logan, Green Arrow) unleash their most ambitious story to date with this complex and mesmerizing new supernatural mystery series. Norton gets closer to the secrets of the Black Barn as Fred discovers a grizzly new crime in Gideon Falls.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The third installment of Gideon Falls is something that’s essentially more of the same and that’s both good and bad. I’m struggling with this book to some degree and part of that is the lettering, which looks really rough on the digital incarnation that I’ve got. The rough look of the artwork is appealing and I like what Sorrentino is doing with layouts and the flow of the story as it’s really engaging. And I love what Lemire is doing with the stage setting of the story and its characters. But it’s still just a bit too ill-defined for me to really connect with just yet as I’m waiting for that moment where it’ll click for me.
Norton’s time is one that’s definitely interesting to watch unfold because he’s struggling with what he understands of events and with what’s been lost recently. Seeing the kind of isolation and loneliness while knowing that things aren’t right is difficult, something that Sorrentino delivers beautifully with the two-page spread we get amid it. Where it gets complicated is when Dr. Xu shows up to talk about what she’s seen and that gets Norton’s hopes up a lot in that he may have an ally now. But as much as Xu talks of what she’s seen, she doesn’t believe and is, in fact, getting ready to commit Norton because of how he’s been acting. She’s in an incredibly weird place after what she’s experience and handling it in a way that shows some really disjointed processing, which isn’t easy considering the traps that Norton’s laid in the place
Father Fred’s storyline is a bit more complicated as there’s a lot of uncertainty as to the path here. He’s essentially cleared in the murder that’s cropped up simply because of the timeframe of it all and that helps, though the sheriff still has something of a distrustful eye toward him. He’s struggling with what the first sermon will be considering all that’s happened before he got there and now and that helps to introduce us to some of the community that exists here. He’s eventually put on the path to meet a Dr. Sutton and he seems like he’s got a strange kind of war that he’s engaged in that’s tied to the Black Barn and other events in Gideo Falls. It’s the kind of moment that these kinds of works have, similar to what Norton has with his newspaper clippings on the wall, but it’s all stuff that’s just really engaging if it can be drawn out well.
In Summary:
Gideon Falls is that kind of series where it’s still working through the “pilot” episode for me and hasn’t quite hooked me hard just yet. As I said last issue, Lemire has earned the trust to keep going with it but it’s not grabbing my interest like a number of other recent works of his. This issue expands things a bit more with the characters and some intriguing choices are being made, particularly with Dr. Xu. But it’s still lacking that hook that I’m looking for to really nail my interest down and get me to the point of eagerly looking forward to more. I’m hoping that it’ll show up sooner rather than later.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: Image Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: May 16th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
